It’s Trying to be Battlefield Again

But I Have Been Burned Before

On a Thursday afternoon, a week or so back, my friend Ryan came over for midlife crisis fight club. It was hot, like 95 degrees, and humid as hell, so we sat around a lot between rounds. On one of those long breaks, I was telling him that Trena had offered to preorder Battlefield 6 as a gift for finishing my MFA, and that I had said no. If you know me, you might find this kind of out of character.

Ryan asked if video games were starting to lose their charm for me. I answered no. I play first-person shooters (FPS) for the same reason I enjoy the consensual violence of midlife crisis fight club. There’s an unmatched competitiveness when someone is trying to take your head off, and it really doesn’t matter all that much if it’s real or virtual.

You see, if I can kill people in a video game or hit someone in the head with a stick, it lessens my innate urge to do these things to random people who may cross my path.

Close on the heels of our conversation, the developer of Battlefield 6 announced two weekends of open beta for the game.

So, the first weekend of the beta rolled around, and it was time to see if the game would live up to my expectations, which, truthfully, had really come down quite a bit in recent years. You see, I, along with a lot of the gaming community, have been disappointed by a lot of the new triple-A titles. And that right there is a big part of the reason I didn’t want to preorder the game as part of my graduation gift.

What if Trena shells out the 70+ dollars and the thing turns out to be a steaming pile on release in October? It’s not like it hasn’t happened to me before. I fell for the hype. Let myself get all worked up for games like Starfield, or No Man’s Sky, or even the previous Battlefield release, only to find myself disappointed, wandering around an empty world or galaxy, or getting a hole punched through my helmet by a sniper before I even had the chance to get the barrel of my weapon warm.

Late on the first night of play, I found myself in a forward operating base in the mountains of Tajikistan. It was beautiful to look at, I’ve got to give the developers that. A valley spread out beyond the coils of concertina wire and MIL units, you know, those giant cubes filled with earth. Small houses with dirty red corrugated roofs sat sprinkled among the rocks below.

But the gates of hell had been torn open, and the roar of it was all but indescribable.

Then a wave of troops, something like 32 of us, poured through and over the fortifications, heading in the direction of the closest objectives. And a clash with the other 32 players on the map.

One of the big selling points for the Battlefield franchise is its team-based play. Things are always a lot harder than they need to be if you’re not with your squad. You’ll bleed out if there’s no support player around to patch you up or find yourself overrun by armor if your engineer can’t put the fear of God into the tank crew. It makes the game feel somehow more alive, more real.

As I scampered among the objectives, I realized Ryan had, in a way, been right. A lot of triple-A games had gotten a bit stale. And I’d just kept on playing more out of habit than anything else, but deep down, I was holding out hope that one of them would manage to return to form and provide an experience like Battlefield 1 or any of the other games where I’ve built memories. Much of the new stuff felt as if the developers had forgotten or just neglected the things that make the experiences memorable.

The Battlefield franchise stumbled in 2018 with the launch of Battlefield 5. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the game, but it felt like something was missing. Then, Battlefield 2042 came along in 2021, and in its first iteration, it was referred to as a running simulator. It was a slog. There were maps that seemed all but unplayable, and the real military feel was gone. It did get better with updates, but the damage was already done.

I’ve heard people say that recent games have been “woke,” and that’s the problem. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It just felt to me like something was missing in the design. The maps from older Battlefield games left you with the feeling that no place was safe if you were on your own. At release, 2042 had big gaps between spawns and objectives, and choke points were few and far between. It made everything seem empty, lifeless.

Back to that night in the mountains of Tajikistan, I turned a corner on a rocky path to move between two of the small houses. My squad was close. We were working as a unit. Just a step or two, and I see movement through a window of the house on the left. An ambush. Shit. Without thinking, I pitch a grenade through the window, it goes off inside the building as I switch to my shotgun and jump through a second window, firing as fast as the thing will go off.

I said earlier that I play FPSs to blow off steam and experience a level of competition and teamwork that’s become harder and harder to find as I’ve gotten older. And it seems like the Battlefield franchise is back. At least in the beta, that is. Things were not without problems, a few crashes, and a design flaw that allowed players to get on a roof and camp, among them, but overall, the play was intense and competitive.

On the other side of that window, there were five enemy players, one of whom was on the floor, bleeding out, I assume because of the grenade. I took down two more with the shotgun before a round to the chest knocked me out of the fight. Lying there on the ground, I was happy with the result. I got to play hero. Then the door popped open, the sound of automatic fire, and the other two soldiers fell, and before I knew it, I was hit with a defibrillator and climbing back to my feet.

I guess we need to wait for the game's full release, but if the beta is any indication, strangers who cross my path may find themselves in a bit less danger after October 10.